Ii and the Discipline of Copying

The long and short palatal vowels are exactly the pair that a tired hand confuses, and a manuscript culture that depends on copying has to have an answer to that. In the Kathmandu Valley the answer was the same one found across the Indian manuscript world: the copy is checked against its exemplar, the scribe records the completion of the work at the end, and a text of standing is copied repeatedly rather than once, so that an error in one line of transmission can be caught against another.

Newar Buddhism preserved a large body of Sanskrit Mahayana scripture in the Valley in this way, at a period when the same texts were becoming scarce elsewhere in South Asia, and the survival of that material is one of the reasons the Valley matters to the study of Buddhism at all. Ranjana is bound up with that history without being the whole of it. Much of the running text of Newar manuscripts is written in other hands of the Valley, with Ranjana reserved for what had to be formal: title lines, chapter headings, mantras, and the display writing on a book cover. A vowel mark like the one for ii therefore appears in both registers, drawn quickly in a working hand and drawn with full weight and contrast where the page was meant to be looked at as well as read.